Son of Pharmalot: popular pharma blog gets relaunch

Ed Silverman is relaunching his Pharmalot blog, which once ruled industry browser bookmarks, next week – though at a more modest pace.

Silverman, one of the top journalists covering the drug and device industries, plans to go live with it sometime in the next few days. He founded the blog for the Star-Ledger of New Jersey in 2007, and at its height, the site was drawing 11,000 users per day and logging 330,000 page views per month. While Silverman has maintained a Pharmalot feed on Twitter, the site was shuttered in January when he took part in a buyout offer by the paper. His editor gave him rights to the name, “almost as a going away gift,” he said.

Silverman has since moved to Elsevier Business Intelligence, where he serves as a bureau chief, editing the Pink Sheet and contributing to other properties, though the latest iteration of Pharmalot will be published not under the auspices of Elsevier, but on his own time. He envisions it as “Son of Pharmalot,” a sort of miniaturized version of the original site, he said.

“Before, people got used to eight or 10 posts a day,” said Silverman. “I won't be doing it full time, I'll be doing a little bit at the beginning and end of the day, so it won't be that tidal wave of items.”

He expects to put up 2-3 posts per day, with a mix of aggregation and original items. “I'll be taking the same approach as before,” he said, “just not as frequent. It will be an experiment, and it will take time to find a groove.”

Silverman said he has missed the rapport he had with Pharmalot's audience, but concedes that “I didn't miss the crazy grind I created for myself.”